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View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoJes Aznar | THE NEW YORK TIMESSurvivors of Typhoon Haiyan cook by flashlight and lamplight in Tacloban, Philippines. Nearly three months after the storm, there are few signs of economic recovery for the once-thriving university town and provincial capital.

By Keith BradsherTHE NEW YORK TIMES • Tuesday February 4, 2014 6:51 AM

ACLOBAN, Philippines — As Jesse Siozon waited for his grandfather’s funeral to begin, beneath
the orange and blue tarps that serve as the roof for the storm-damaged Santo Nio Church, he spoke
of a double loss.

His grandfather might well have been the last person in this bedraggled city to succumb to
injuries and illnesses brought on by Typhoon Haiyan. And now Siozon, a 30-year-old nurse, is being
forced to leave Tacloban, his family’s hometown for four generations, because efforts to rebuild
have stalled and jobs have disappeared for skilled workers like him.

“I wish I could have worked here,” he said as sunlight streamed through the hole in a
stained-glass window donated by his grandfather. “I don’t even have a place to live here.”

Nearly three months after some of the strongest sustained winds ever recorded drove ashore a
wall of water up to 25 feet high, this once-thriving university town and provincial capital shows
relatively few signs of economic recovery despite an international rescue effort. At night, it is
mainly plunged into darkness, and the few temporary houses completed by the government have been
declared too cramped for human habitation.

The city is caught in a spiral of deprivation that will be difficult to break, especially given
the scope of a catastrophe that killed at least 6,000 people and was the deadliest natural disaster
in the world last year.

Without power and other basics, businesses are finding it difficult to recover. And without
commerce, the city will continue to lose money — and talent.

The continuing confusion has left this city, which once envisioned becoming a new economic hub,
struggling to hold on to young and talented residents. Like Siozon, they are leaving for work
elsewhere in the Philippines’ growing economy.

“The young professionals whom I know have left, because of the quality of life here,” said Jerry
T. Yaokasin, the deputy mayor of Tacloban. “When I look around, it is as if it happened yesterday —
there is still so much devastation.”

Some aspects of life in Tacloban have improved since the storm hit on Nov. 8. Relief food and
drinking water are available — although the cost of drinking-water jugs has increased sixfold.
Residents say crime is low, despite the lifting of a curfew imposed in the desperate first days of
lawlessness after the storm.

But other problems appear intractable, including the lack of decent housing. The storm destroyed
or severely damaged the homes of more than 4 million people — more than twice as many as in the
Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, which killed more than 200,000 people but did not steal as many homes
from the living.

Many people here are living in tents. The temporary homes rejected by United Nations experts —
little more than rows of plywood stalls under a high roof, with shared bathrooms nearby — are being
renovated. But widening the living stalls will mean fewer families can move in.

And the lack of electricity is a constant worry for those trying to breathe life into the city’s
mostly moribund economy and forestall a further exodus.

Running gasoline or diesel generators is prohibitively expensive for many businesses, in some
cases costing six times as much as grid electricity. So they operate at less than full capacity, if
at all.

That can have a compounding effect. IP Car Tech, the biggest truck- and car-repair shop in the
region, can operate only one of its 18 vehicle lifts at a time with its diesel generator. That
means many of the thousands of typhoon-damaged cars, trucks and even ambulances needed for commerce
and daily life remain unusable.

Energy Secretary C. Jericho Petilla initially promised a restoration of electricity service by
Christmas Eve, then pushed the target to the end of March. But with fewer than a quarter of the
buildings reconnected to the grid, even that goal appears elusive.

Complicating matters is the extensive pillaging that took place in the first two weeks after the
storm. Roughly 1,100 convicts escaped from three prisons and joined residents in ransacking large
areas, sometimes for necessities, sometimes not.

Up to a third of Tacloban’s transformers were torn apart for their copper cores, which could be
sold for scrap at $220 apiece on the black market. The transformers cost $1,600 apiece to replace,
plus labor. Sections of downed power lines were snipped and stolen for the copper inside, making it
impossible to simply send out trucks to lift the lines back onto poles.

In any case, a lack of spare parts means that two of the local utility’s six boom trucks are
unusable. So line workers are sent out in vans every day to bundle up downed lines before they,
too, can be stolen.